FJ Kashmir

Book: This our paradise Author: Karan Mujoo Publisher: Penguin Random House Pages: 240  Reviewer: inam ul rehman It is never, never easy for any deracinated writer to have a sympathetic look at the place where there community was forced to live a life of exile. Then to expect them to rationally find answers why things happened is not possible from mere mortals.   Karan Mujoo’s novel, set in the Kashmir Valley , sweeps away stereotypes with his characters. A fictional book where the author juxtaposes two communities of Kashmir to explore what went wrong. We have Shahid , living in a distant land where life has remained fossilised, refuse to take up a government job, believing he is destined for extraordinary things that will shape history. Our protagonist is 8-years-old when the novel commences. He is deeply attached to his uncle, Vicky , a Marxist in the making. The premonition of things to come starts right when our protagonist moves to his new home in Bagh-i-Mehtab in...

inam ul rehman    If Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires Kashmir is the graveyard of reputations. The latest example of this is the Jamaat-i-Islami . From violently taking on the Indian state from 1990 to 2019 to its final meltdown, or the National Conference challenging the rule of the Indian state on Kashmir to finally acceding to it, Kashmir has seen many others crumbling under their own inflated weight.    As the present “panel head” of the banned Jamaat-i-Islami finally said publicly his party is ready to contest elections, adding it never issued boycott calls. One wonders why this politico-religious party lies so much? Officially the party endorsed election boycott calls throughout the 90s well upto 2014 ( https://kashmirlife.net/ jamaat-e-islami-supports- geelanis-poll-boycott-call- 48486/ ). (If the Jamaat hadn’t pulled out its website one could have easily show them their past statements. But there is still a vast digital repository where one can find...